Using dropdown menus in forms might seem a no-brainer: they don’t take much space on the UI, they automatically validate the input, all browsers and platforms support them, they’re easy and cheap to implement, and the users know them well enough.

When we’ve noticed that our app was responding slowly, we tried the usual optimisations. But the effect wasn’t really satisfying. As it turned out, the slowest part of our application was uploading files. But is it even possible to make uploading faster?